Lastly, it is quite impossible to evolve the Moral Law out of anything but itself. Attempts have been made, and many more will no doubt be made, to trace the origin of the spiritual faculty to a development of the other faculties. And it is to be expected that great success will ultimately attend the endeavours to show the growth of all the subordinate powers of the soul. That our emotions, that our impulses, that our affections should have had a history, and that their present working should be the result of that history, has nothing in it improbable. There can be no question that we inherit these things very largely, and that they are also very largely due to special peculiarities of constitution in each individual. That large part of us which is rightly assigned to our nature as distinct from our own will and our own free action, it is perfectly reasonable to find subject to laws of Evolution. Much of this nature, indeed, we share with the lower animals. They, too, can love; can be angry or pleased; can put affection above appetite; can show generosity and nobility of spirit; can be patient, persevering, tender, self-sacrificing; can take delight in society: and some can even organise it, and thus enter on a kind of civilisation. The dog and the horse, man's faithful servants and companions, show emotions and affections rising as far as mere emotions and affections can rise to the human level. Ants show an advance in the arts of life well comparable to our own. If the bare animal nature is thus capable of such high attainments by the mere working of natural forces, it is to be expected that similar forces in mankind should be found to work under similar laws. We are not spiritual beings only, we are animals, and whatever nature has done for other animals we may expect it to have done and to be doing for us. And if their nature is capable of evolution, so too should ours be. And the study of such evolution of our own nature is likely to be of the greatest value. This nature is the main instrument, put into the grasp as it were of that spiritual faculty which is our inmost essence, to be used in making our whole life an offering to God. It is good to know what can be done with this instrument and what cannot; how it has been formed in the past, and may be still further formed for the future. It is good to study the evolution of humanity. But all this does not touch the spiritual faculty itself, nor the Moral Law which that faculty proclaims to us. The essence of that law is its universality; and out of all this development, when carried to its very perfection, the conception of such universality cannot be obtained. Nothing in this evolution ever rises to the height of a law which shall bind even God Himself and enable Abraham to say, 'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?' The very word right in this, its fulness of meaning, cannot be used.

Evolution may lead the creature to say what is hateful and what is loveable, what is painful and what is delightful, what is to be feared and what is to be sought; it may develope the sentiment which comes nearest of all to the sentiment of reverence, namely, the sentiment of shame; but it cannot reveal the eternal character of the distinction between right and wrong. Nay, there may be, as was pointed out in the last Lecture, an evolution in our knowledge even of the Moral Law, just as there is an evolution in our knowledge of mathematics. The fulness of its meaning can become clearer and ever clearer as generation learns from generation. But the principle of the Moral Law, its universality, its supremacy, cannot come out of any development of human nature any more than the necessity of mathematical truth can so come. It stands not on experience, and is its own evidence. Nor indeed have any of the attempts to show that everything in man (religion included) is the product of Evolution ever touched the question how this conception of universal supremacy comes in. It is treated as if it were an unauthorised extension from our own experience to what lies beyond all experience. This, however, is to deny the essence of the Moral Law altogether: that Law is universal or it is nothing.

Now, when we compare the account of the creation and of man given by the doctrine of Evolution with that given in the Bible, we see at once that the two are in different regions. The purpose of giving the accounts is different; the spirit and character of the accounts is different; the details are altogether different. The comparison must take note of the difference of spirit and aim before it can proceed at all.

It is then quite certain, and even those who contend for the literal interpretation of this part of the Bible will generally admit, that the purpose of the revelation is not to teach Science at all. It is to teach great spiritual and moral lessons, and it takes the facts of nature as they appear to ordinary people. When the creation of man is mentioned there is clearly no intention to say by what processes this creation was effected, or how much time it took to work out those processes. The narrative is not touched by the question, Was this a single act done in a moment, or a process lasting through millions of years? The writer of the Book of Genesis sees the earth peopled, as we may say, by many varieties of plants and animals. He asserts that God made them all, and made them resemble each other and differ from each other. He knows nothing and says nothing of the means used to produce their resemblances or their differences. He takes them as he sees them, and speaks of their creation as God's work. Had he been commissioned to teach his people the science of the matter, he would have had to put a most serious obstacle in the way of their faith. They would have found it almost impossible to believe in a process of creation so utterly unlike all their own experience. And it would have been quite useless to them besides, since their science was not in such a condition as to enable them to coordinate this doctrine with any other. As science it would have been dead; and as spiritual truth it would have been a hindrance.

But he had, nevertheless, great ideas to communicate, and we can read them still.

He had to teach that the world as we see it, and all therein contained, was created out of nothing; and that the spiritual, and not the material, was the source of all existence. He had to teach that the creation was not merely orderly, but progressive; going from the formless to the formed; from the orderless to the ordered; from the inanimate to the animate; from the plant to the animal; from the lower animal to the higher; from the beast to the man; ending with the rest of the Sabbath, the type of the highest, the spiritual, life. Nothing, certainly, could more exactly match the doctrine of Evolution than this. It is, in fact, the same thing said from a different point of view. All this is done by casting the account into the form of a week of work with the Sabbath at the end. In so constructing his account, the writer made use of a mode of teaching used commonly enough in the Bible. The symbolical use of the number seven is common in other inspired writers. The symbolical use of periods of time is not without example. That the purpose of the account was not to teach great truths, but to give men information upon scientific questions, is incredible. And, in fact, if we look in this account for literal history, it becomes very difficult to give any meaning to what is said of the seventh day, or to reconcile the interpretation of it with our Lord's words concerning the Sabbath, 'My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.' There is no more reason for setting aside Geology, because it does not agree in detail with Genesis, than there is for setting aside Astronomy because all through the Old Testament the sun is spoken of as going round the earth.

And when the writer of Genesis passes from creation in general to man in particular, it is still clear that he has no mission to tell those for whom he was writing by what processes man was formed, or how long those processes lasted. This was as alien from his purpose as it would have been to tell what every physiologist now knows of the processes by which every individual man is developed from a small germ to a breathing and living infant. He takes men—and he could not but take men as he sees them—with their sinful nature, with their moral and spiritual capacity, with their relations of sex, with their relations of family. He has to teach the essential supremacy of man among creatures, the subordination in position but equality in nature of woman to man, the original declension of man's will from the divine path, the dim and distant but sure hope of man's restoration. These are not, and cannot be, lessons of science. They are worked out into the allegory of the Garden of Eden. But in this allegory there is nothing whatever that crosses the path of science, nor is it for reasons of science that so many great Christian thinkers from the earliest age of the Church downwards have pronounced it an allegory. The spiritual truth contained in it is certainly the purpose for which it is told; and evolution such as science has rendered probable had done its work in forming man such as he is before the narrative begins.

It may be said that it seems inconsistent with the dignity of man's nature as described in the Bible to believe that his formation was effected by any process of evolution, still more by any such process of evolution as would represent him to have been an animal before he became a man.

But, in the first place, it is to be observed that Science does not yet assert, and there is no reason to believe that it ever will assert, that man became a fully developed animal, with the brute instincts and inclinations, appetites and passions, fully formed, an animal such as we see other animals now, before he passed on into a man such as man is now. His body may have been developed according to the theory of Evolution, yet along a parallel but independent line of its own; but at any rate it branched off from other animals at a very early point in the descent of animal life. And, further, as Science cannot yet assert that life was not introduced into the world when made habitable by a direct creative act, so too Science cannot yet assert, and it is tolerably certain will never assert, that the higher and added life, the spiritual faculty, which is man's characteristic prerogative, was not given to man by a direct creative act as soon as the body which was to be the seat and the instrument of that spiritual faculty had been sufficiently developed to receive it. That the body should have been first prepared, and that when it was prepared the soul should either have been then given, or then first made to live in the image of God,—this is a supposition which is inconsistent neither with what the Bible tells nor with what Science has up to this time proved.

And to this must be added that it is out of place for us to define what is consistent or inconsistent with the dignity of man in the process or method by which he was created to be what he is. His dignity consists in his possession of the spiritual faculty, and not in the method by which he became possessed of it. We cannot tell, we never can tell, and the Bible never professes to tell, what powers or gifts are wrapped up in matter itself, or in that living matter of which we are made. How absolutely nothing we know of the mode by which any single soul is created! The germ which is to become a man can be traced by the physiologist through all the changes that it has to undergo before it comes to life. Is the future soul wrapped up in it from the first, and dormant till the hour of awakening comes? or is it given at some moment in the development? We see in the infant how its powers expand, and we know that the spiritual faculty, the very essence of its being, has a development like the other faculties. It has in it the gift of speech, and yet it cannot speak. Judgment, and taste, and power of thought; self-sacrifice and unswerving truth; science and art, and spiritual understanding, all may be there in abundant measure and yet may show no sign. All this we know; and because it is common and well known we see nothing inconsistent with the dignity of our nature in this concealment of all that dignity, helpless and powerless, within the form of an infant in arms. With this before us it is impossible to say that anything which Science has yet proved, or ever has any chance of proving, is inconsistent with the place given to man in Creation by the teaching of the Bible.

In conclusion, we cannot find that Science, in teaching Evolution, has yet asserted anything that is inconsistent with Revelation, unless we assume that Revelation was intended not to teach spiritual truth only, but physical truth also. Here, as in all similar cases, we find that the writer of the Book of Genesis, like all the other writers in the Bible, took nature as he saw it, and expressed his teaching in language corresponding to what he saw. And the doctrine of Evolution, in so far as it has been shown to be true, does but fill out in detail the declaration that we are 'fearfully and wonderfully made; marvellous are Thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.' There is nothing in all that Science has yet taught, or is on the way to teach, which conflicts with the doctrine that we are made in the Divine Image, rulers of the creation around us by a Divine superiority, the recipients of a Revelation from a Father in Heaven, and responsible to judgment by His Law. We know not how the first human soul was made, just as we know not how any human soul has been made since; but we know that we are, in a sense in which no other creatures living with us are, the children of His special care.



LECTURE VII.

APPARENT COLLISION OF SCIENCE WITH THE CLAIM TO SUPERNATURAL POWER.

The claim to work miracles parallel to the freedom of the will. The miracles of Revelation need not be miracles of Science. Our Lord's Resurrection, and His miracles of healing, possibly not miraculous in the scientific sense. Different aspect of miracles now and at the time when the Revelation was given. Miracles attested by the Apostles, by our Lord's character, by our Lord's power. Nature of evidence required to prove miracles; not such as to put physical above spiritual evidence; not such as to be unsuited to their own day. Impossibility of demonstrating universal uniformity. Revelation no obstacle to the progress of Science.



LECTURE VII.

APPARENT COLLISION OF SCIENCE WITH THE CLAIM TO SUPERNATURAL POWER.

'Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me: or else believe Me for the very works' sake.' St. John xiv. 11.

Science and Religion come into apparent collision on the question of the freedom of the will. Science and Revelation come into a similar apparent collision on the possibility of miracles. The cases are precisely parallel. In each individual man the uniformity of nature is broken to leave room for the moral force of the will to assert its independent existence. This breach of uniformity is within very narrow limits, and occurs much more rarely than appears at first sight. But the demand to admit not only the possibility but the fact of this breach is imperative, and to deny it is to turn the command of the Moral Law as revealed in the conscience into a delusion. So, too, Revelation asserts its right to set aside the uniformity of nature to leave room for a direct communication from God to man. It is an essential part of the Divine Moral Law to claim supremacy over the physical world. Unless somehow or other the moral ultimately rules the physical, the Moral Law cannot rightly claim our absolute obedience. Revelation as given to us maintains that this superiority has been asserted in fact here in the world of phenomena. To deny this is very nearly equivalent to denying that any revelation has been made. In this way Revelation asserts, for God's message to the human race precisely the same breach of uniformity which every man's conscience claims for himself in regard to his own conduct.

It is, however, necessary to point out that when we speak of a breach of uniformity we are never in a position to deny that the breach of uniformity may be physical only and perhaps apparent only. It may be found, it probably will be found, at last that the Moral Law has in some way always maintained its own uniformity unbroken. The Moral Law has in its essence an elasticity which the physical law has not. It often takes the form, that, given certain conduct, there will follow certain consequences; and the law is kept though the conduct is free. It is further possible, and Revelation has no interest in denying it, that the intervention which has apparently disturbed the sequence of phenomena is, after all, that of a higher physical law as yet unknown. For instance, the miraculous healing of the sick may be no miracle in the strictest sense at all. It may be but an instance of the power of mind over body, a power which is undeniably not yet brought within the range of Science, and which nevertheless may be really within its domain. In other ways what seems to be miraculous may be simply unusual. And it must therefore be always remembered that Revelation is not bound by the scientific definition of a miracle, and that if all the miraculous events recorded in the Bible happened exactly as they are told, and if Science were some day able to show that they could be accounted for by natural causes working at the time in each case, this would not in any way affect their character, as regards the Revelation which they were worked to prove or of which they form a part. Revelation uses these events for its own purposes. Some of these events are spoken of as evidences of a divine mission. Some of them are substantive facts embraced in the message delivered. And if for these purposes they have served their turn, if they have arrested attention which would not otherwise have been arrested, if they have overcome prejudices, if they have compelled belief, the fact that they are afterwards discovered to be no breach of the law of uniformity has no bearing at all on the Revelation to which they belong. The miracle would in that case consist in the precise coincidence in time with the purpose which they served, or in the manner and degree in which they marked out the Man who wrought them from all other men, or in the foreshadowing of events which are in the distant future.

Thus, for instance, it is quite possible that our Lord's Resurrection may be found hereafter to be no miracle at all in the scientific sense. It foreshadows and begins the general Resurrection; when that general Resurrection comes we may find that it is, after all, the natural issue of physical laws always at work.

There is nothing at present to indicate anything of the sort; but a general resurrection in itself implies not a special interference but a general rule. If, when we rise again, we find that this resurrection is and always was a part of the Divine purpose, and brought about at last by machinery precisely the same in kind as that which has been used in making and governing the world, we may also find that our Lord's Resurrection was brought about by the operation of precisely the same machinery. We may find that even in the language of strict science 'He was the first fruits of them that slept,' and that His Resurrection was not a miracle, but the first instance of the working of a law till the last day quite unknown, but on that last day operative on all that ever lived.

Let us compare the general resurrection with the first introduction of life into the world. As far as scientific observation has yet gone that first introduction of life was a miracle. No one has ever yet succeeded in tracing it to the operation of any known laws. If it is a miracle it is a miracle precisely similar in kind to the miracle which believers are expecting at the last day. And assuredly if a miracle was once worked to introduce life into this habitable world, there is very good reason to expect that another miracle will be worked hereafter to restore life to those that have lived. But there are scientific men who think that the introduction of life was not a miracle, that it came at the fitting moment by the working of natural laws; or, in other words, that such properties are inherent in the elements of which protoplasm is made that in certain special circumstances these elements will not only combine but that the product of their combination will live. If this be so, it is assuredly no such very strange supposition that there may be such properties inherent in our bodies or in certain particles, whether particles of matter or not, belonging to our bodies, that in certain special circumstances these particles will return to life. And if this be so the general resurrection may be no miracle, but the result of the properties originally inherent in our bodies and of the working of the laws of those properties. And as the general resurrection so our Lord's Resurrection may in this way turn out to be no breach of the uniformity of nature.

But this new discovery, if then made, would not affect the place which our Lord's Resurrection holds in the records of Revelation. It is not the purpose of Revelation to interfere with the course of nature; if such interference be needless, and the work of revealing God to man can be done without it, there is no reason whatever to believe that any such interference would take place.

Or, take again any of our Lord's miracles of healing. There is no question at all that the power of mind over body is exceedingly great, and has never yet been thoroughly examined. We know almost nothing of the extent of this power, of its laws, of its limits. Marvellous recoveries often astonish the physician, and he cannot account for them except by supposing that in some way the powers of the mind have been roused to interfere with the working of the nervous system. And some men, on the other hand, have died or their health has been shattered by mere imaginations. Some men of note have attributed the recoveries claimed for homoeopathy to this cause. Some have assigned to this cause the extraordinary cures that have been undeniably wrought at the shrines, or on sight or touch of the relics, of Roman Catholic saints. The different impostures that have on many occasions prevailed for a time and then lost their reputation and passed out of fashion, are generally supposed to have owed their short-lived success to the same obscure working of unknown natural laws. They have been tested by their successes and their failures. They have succeeded, and for a time continued to succeed; but at last they have ceased to work because faith in them for some reason or other has been shaken down. Their falsehood has thus been detected; but nevertheless their genuine success for a time has been enough to show that they rested on a reality, and that reality seems to have consisted in the strange power of mind over body. In this region all is at present unexamined; and all operations are tentative, and for that reason most are only successful for a time. Now our Lord's miracles are never tentative; that is not the character given to them either by friend or by foe. Nor is there any instance recorded either by friend or by foe of an attempted miracle not accomplished. Nowhere is there any record given us by the assailants of the Gospel of any instance of His action parallel to the record given in the Acts of the Apostles of the seven sons of Sceva the Jew. The accounts of his enemies charge Him with deceit, which is identical with saying that they did not believe Him. But they do not ever charge Him with failure. Nevertheless it is quite conceivable that many of His miracles of healing may have been the result of this power of mind over body which we are now considering. It is possible that they may be due not to an interference with the uniformity of nature, but to a superiority in His mental power to the similar power possessed by other men. Men seem to possess this power both over their own bodies and over the bodies of others in different degrees. Some can influence other men's bodies through their minds more; some less. Possibly He may have possessed this power absolutely where others possessed it conditionally. He may have possessed it without limit; others within limits. If this were so, these acts of healing would not be miracles in the strictly scientific sense. They would imply very great superiority in Him to other men. But they would be in themselves under the law of uniformity. Now it is clear that if this should turn out to be so, though these acts would not be miracles for the purposes of Science, they would still be miracles for the purposes of Revelation. They would do their work in arresting attention, and still more in accrediting both the message and the Messenger. They would separate Him from ordinary men. They would prove Him to be possessed of credentials worth examining. To the believer it would make no difference whether Science called them miracles or not. To him it would still remain the fact that here was a Messenger whom God had seen fit to endow with powers which no other man ever possessed in such degree and such completeness, though others may have possessed some touch of them greater or less.

Further, it is necessary to repeat what was briefly remarked in a previous Lecture, that the position which miracles take as regards us who read them many centuries after, and as regards those who witnessed and recorded them at the time, is quite different. To them the miracles were the first and often the chief proof that the man who wrought them had been sent by God, and that His message was a revelation, not an imposture; to us they are, if accepted at all, accepted as a part of the revelation itself. There are no doubt a few minds that are convinced by Paley's argument, and beginning with accepting the miracles as proved by sufficient external evidence, go on to accept the conclusion that therefore the teaching that was thus accompanied must be divine. But most men are quite unable to take to pieces in this way the records in which Revelation is contained, and to go from external evidence taken alone to the messengers who thus proved their mission, and thence to the substance of the message which they taught. To most of us, on the contrary, the Revelation is a whole, capable of being looked at from many sides, and found to be divine from whatever side it is seen; and one of its aspects is this supernatural character by which it appears to assert its identity with that Moral Law which claims absolute supremacy over all the physical world. The main evidence of the Revelation to us consists in its harmony with the voice of the spiritual faculty within us; and the claim which it asserts to have come through teachers endowed with supernatural power is so far corroborative evidence as it falls in with the essential character of the Moral Law. That eternal law claims supremacy over the physical world and actually asserts it in the freedom of the human will; and a Revelation which comes from Him Who in His own essential Being is that very law personified, might be expected to exhibit the same claim in actual manifestation in its approach to men.

Bearing these limitations and characteristics of the miraculous element in the Bible in mind, let us ask how that miraculous element is therein presented.

First, in the account of the creation, it is taught that the original existence of all matter flows from a spiritual source. We do not define God as the cause, meaning that that is His essence, and that except as causing other things to exist He does not exist Himself. But we describe Him as the Cause, meaning that all things exist by His Will, and that without His Will nothing could ever have existed. And as the Revelation tells us that He is the source of all existence, the Creator of the substance of things, so too does it assert that He gave all things their special properties and the laws of those properties, and that not only the original creation, but all the subsequent history of all things has been the outcome of His design, and that He has thus prescribed the government of the whole universe. And yet again the Revelation from the beginning to the end maintains His living Presence in and over all things that He has thus formed, and denies that He has parted with His power to do fresh acts of creation, fresh acts of government, whenever and wherever He sees fit. For He is necessarily free and cannot be restrained by anything but His own holiness. And unless He expressly revealed to us that His own holiness prevented Him from interfering with His own creation, we could not put limits to what He could do. The Revelation that He has given us says just the contrary, and from end to end implies that He is present in the government of the creation which He has made.

What evidence, then, is there in the world of phenomena that He has ever thus interfered? Putting aside as untenable all idea of a priori impossibility, admitting that God can work a miracle if He will, admitting that a miracle avowedly worked in the interest of a divine revelation stands on a totally different footing from a miracle avowedly worked in any other interest, putting the breach of the law of uniformity made by a miracle on the same footing as the breach of the same law made by a human will; we have to ask what evidence can be given that any such miracles as are recorded in the Bible have ever been worked?

It is plain at once that the answer must be given by the New Testament. No such evidence can now be produced on behalf of the miracles in the Old Testament. The times are remote; the date and authorship of the Books not established with certainty; the mixture of poetry with history no longer capable of any sure separation into its parts; and, if the New Testament did not exist, it would be impossible to show such a distinct preponderance of probability as would justify us in calling on any to accept the miraculous parts of the narrative as historically true.

But in the New Testament we stand on different ground. And we have here first the evidence which Paley has put together to show that the early Christians spent their lives and finally surrendered their lives as witnesses to a Gospel which included miracles both among its evidences and as part of its substance. It is not possible to get rid of miracles nor the belief in miracles from the history of the Apostles. They testify to our Lord's Resurrection as to an actual fact, and make it the basis of all their preaching. They testify to our Lord's miracles as part of the character of His life. It is necessary to maintain that they were mere fanatics with no claim to respect but rather to the pity which we feel for utterly ignorant goodness, if we are to hold that no miracle was ever wrought by our Lord. It is difficult to maintain even their honesty if they preached the Resurrection of our Lord without any basis of fact to rest on. No man who is not determined to uphold an opinion at all hazards can question that St. Paul and St. Peter believed that our Lord rose from the dead, and that they died for and in that belief.

But, in the second place, behind the Apostles stands our Lord Himself, and whatever may be said of the documents that compose the New Testament, they are at any rate sufficient to show that our Lord was universally believed by His disciples to have the power of working miracles and to have often worked them. There is no hesitation in regard to this; no hint of any doubt. But not only so, there is no hint of any disclaimer on His part. He must have known whether He could work miracles or not. He must have known that His disciples believed Him to possess the power. There is not the slightest trace of His ever having implied that this was a misconception. He did sometimes disclaim what was ascribed to Him, even when what was ascribed to Him was truly His, but was ascribed to Him without real knowledge of what it implied. 'Why callest thou Me good? There is none good but One, that is, God,' we DO find. But 'Why askest thou Me to do this? There is none that can do this but One, that is God,' we do NOT find. It is plain that He accepted the belief that assigned Him powers above those of other men—powers given Him by His Father in heaven—and never discouraged it. Nay, He demanded it. Take the lowest ground, and admit for argument's sake that the New Testament contains a legendary element, and still you cannot cut the miracles out of the Gospels and Epistles without altering them beyond recognition. The Jesus Christ presented to us in the New Testament would become a different person if the miracles were removed. And if He claimed to possess and exercise this power, the evidence becomes the evidence of One Who must have known and Whom we cannot disbelieve.

And this claim, which He has thus made, and which was thus accepted by His disciples, is corroborated by the power, different in form but similar in kind, which He exerted then on the men of His own day, and has ever since continued to exert on all succeeding generations. The first disciples were under His absolute dominion. They preached Christ and not themselves. They referred everything to Him, and professed to have no power but from Him. St. Paul with all his genius and marvellous power of influence, yet professes to be nothing without Christ and to be everything in Christ. Our Lord left no writing behind Him, but committed His Revelation to His Apostles, and we only know Him through them. But they are not like ordinary disciples of a great teacher; philosophers succeeding a philosopher; prophets succeeding a prophet. To no one of them does it occur for a moment to teach anything except as from Him. St. Paul gives advice sometimes which he does not profess to be giving by our Lord's command, but when he does so, he puts the mark of his own inferiority on what he says, and claims for it no such authority as belongs to a word from Christ. A word from Christ was final on all subjects.

And this power over men has never weakened from that day to this. There is no other power like it in the world. Science proceeds in far the majority of cases by trial of some theory as a working hypothesis. Such too has been the procedure of Christian Faith. Trust Christ; stake your happiness on Him; stake your hope of satisfying all spiritual aspirations on Him; stake your power of winning the victory over temptation on Him—this is the exhortation of Apostle, and martyr, and saint, and evangelist, and pastor, and teacher. And those who have thus tried the strength of the Christian hypothesis have not failed. The Christian Church has been stained with many a blot. Ill deeds have been wrought in the name of Christ. Evil laws have been passed. Strange superstitions have prevailed. But no other body can show such saints, no other body can produce so great a cloud of witnesses. It is certain that the lives and the deaths, the characters and the aims, of those who have trusted their all to Christ have made them what He bade them be, the salt of the earth. And they testify with one voice that they know no other power which has upheld them but the power of Christ whom they have taken for their Lord. Others have sometimes been set up as in some sort rivals to Him as teachers or as examples; but here there is no rival even pretended. In no other man have men been called on to believe as a living present power, able to give strength and victory in the conflicts of the soul. The Church, too, has passed through times of spiritual depression, we may almost say of degradation. And in the worst of times within the Church there has always remained a wonderful recuperative power, which has shaken off inconsistencies and defects in the past, and will do so yet more in the future. But this recuperative power has always shown itself in one form, and in one form only, namely, a return to Christ and to trust in Him, a trust which has never been falsified.

The martyrdom of our Lord's disciples is enough to prove that belief in His supernatural powers and in His exercise of those powers was no gradual growth of later times, but from the very beginning rooted in the convictions of those who must have known the truth. The character of our Lord as revealed in the Gospels makes it impossible to disbelieve His claims whatever they may be. His power attested by generations of believers ever since corroborates those claims by the persistent evidence of eighteen centuries.

Against this evidence what is to be said?

It is said that the evidence for the uniformity of nature is so overwhelming that nothing can set it aside. And further it is said, that, even if it be conceded that it might be set aside, no evidence sufficient for the purpose has yet been produced.

Now to deal with this second assertion first, we must ask what is the nature of the evidence that would be deemed sufficient? If the inquirer does not believe that God created and still governs the world, assuredly no evidence will ever be sufficient to convince him that God has worked a miracle. The existence of God is certainly not to be proved by His interference with nature. Had He desired to reveal Himself to us primarily in that way, He would have wrought many more miracles than we now know of, and would have kept our faith alive by perpetual and unmistakeable manifestations of His presence and power. But He has not so willed. He has made our belief in Him rest mainly on the voice within ourselves, in order that we might walk by faith and not by sight. It will be a hopeless task to convince men that there is a God by pointing, not to His creation but to His interference with creation. But if a man do believe there is a God, what kind of evidence ought he to expect to show him that God has interfered in the course of the creation?

In the first place, he must not expect that the physical evidence, that is the miraculous evidence, for Revelation should be of such a character as to stand above the spiritual evidence. Just as the fundamental evidence for the existence of a God is to be found in the voice of conscience, and the arguments from design and from the order and beauty and visible purpose of the creation are secondary—corroborative not demonstrative—so too the primary evidence of a Revelation from God must be found in the harmony of that Revelation with the voice of conscience, and only the secondary and corroborative evidence is to be looked for in miracles. And in both cases the reason is the same. For it is not God's purpose to win the intellectually gifted, the wise, the cultivated, the clever, but to win the spiritually gifted, the humble, the tender-hearted, the souls that are discontented with their own shortcomings, the souls that have a capacity for finding happiness in self-sacrifice. It would defeat the purpose of the Revelation made to us if the hard-headed should have an advantage in accepting it over the humble-minded. The evidence must be such that spiritual character shall be an element in the acceptance of it. There would be a contradiction, if the faculty whereby we mainly recognised God were the spiritual faculty, and the faculty whereby we mainly recognised His Revelation were the scientific faculty.

And, in the second place, we have no right to expect that the evidence for miracles wrought in one age should be such evidence as properly belongs to another age. It is sometimes urged that the evidence supplied by the testimony of the early Christians is of little value because it was never cross-examined. No such precautions surrounded the evidence as would now be required to give any value to evidence of similar events. The witnesses gave up their lives to attest what they taught; but there was no one to scrutinise what they asserted. St. Paul's evidence on our Lord's Resurrection cannot now be put to the test of searching questions. But to make such objections as these is to make what is on the face of it an absurd demand. It is to ask that the scientific processes of the nineteenth century should have been anticipated in the first, that men should be miraculously guided to supply a kind of evidence which would be utterly superfluous at the time in order to be convincing eighteen hundred years afterwards. This would indeed have put the miraculous incidents in the New Testament narrative altogether out of place, and made the miracles more important than the Revelation which they were worked to introduce.

Now, if these two conditions are borne in mind, it is difficult to see what better evidence could be obtained of a miraculous life than we possess concerning the life of our Lord.

The moral and spiritual evidence is His own character which intentionally overshadows all the rest, and it is inconceivable that He should have made a false claim. And the material evidence is the testimony of men who freely gave their lives in proof of what they said. Nor has anything yet been said or written to shake Paley's argument on this point.

But, if we pass on to the other objection, that no evidence can ever be sufficient to prove a miracle because the evidence for the uniformity of nature is so overwhelming, we can only see in such an assertion an instance of that inability to get out of an accustomed groove against which Science has perpetually to guard. In Science the uniformity of nature is so indispensable a postulate, that without it we cannot stir a step. And if the student of Science is to admit a breach, it can only be by stepping outside of his science for the time and conceiving the possibility that there is some other truth beside scientific truth, and some other kind of evidence beside scientific evidence. We have all heard of the need of guarding against the bondage in which custom binds the mind. We have heard of the student who when first he saw a locomotive looked perseveringly for the horses that impelled it, because he had never known, and consequently could not imagine any other mode of producing such motion. But this danger attends not only the separate investigations which Science makes into phenomena; it attends Science as a whole. And it is necessary repeatedly to insist on the fact that Science has not proved and cannot prove that the scientific domain is co-extensive with nature itself.

The evidence for the uniformity of nature consists in the fact that from the beginning of Science the known reign of physical law has been steadily extending without a check; that instance after instance of apparent exception has been brought by further examination within its province; that the hypothesis of uniformity has now been long on trial and has never yet been found to fail; that no one who has so tried it has the slightest hesitation in trusting it for the future, as he has proved it in the past. But clearly as this evidence proves a general, it never gets beyond a general, uniformity. It has not succeeded in showing that the human will comes under the same rule. It has not succeeded in silencing the voice within us, which claims superiority for the moral over the physical. And when the utmost extent of human knowledge is compared with the vastness of nature, the claim to extend the induction from generality to universality is seen to be utterly untenable. So much as this, indeed, Science has rendered highly probable, that the uniformity of nature is never broken except for a moral purpose. It is only for such a purpose that the will is ever free. It is only for such a purpose that Revelation has ever claimed to be superior to nature. But beyond this Science cannot go. Let it be granted that the claim for freedom of the will has been often unduly pushed far beyond this limit, and let it be granted that religions professing to be revelations have included records of miracles which had no moral purpose. This does not affect the general conclusion that the evidence for uniformity has never succeeded, and can never succeed in showing, that the God who made and rules the universe never sets aside a physical law for a moral purpose, either by working through the human will or by direct action on external nature.

Science will continue its progress, and as the thoughts of men become clearer it will be perpetually more plainly seen that nothing in Revelation really interferes with that progress. It will be seen that devout believers can observe, can cross-question nature, can look for uniformity and find it, with as keen an eye, with as active an imagination, with as sure a reasoning, as those who deny entirely all possibility of miracles and reject all Revelation on that account. The belief that God can work miracles and has worked them, has never yet obstructed the path of a single student of Science; nor has any student who repudiated that belief found any aid in his study from that repudiation. The rush of Science of late years has for the time made many men fancy that Science is everything; and believers in Revelation have helped this fancy by insisting on their part that Revelation is everything; but such waves of opinion, resting really on feeling, are sure to pass away, and scientific men will learn that there are other kinds of knowledge besides scientific knowledge, as believers are already learning that God teaches us by other methods besides the method of Revelation. The students of the Bible will certainly learn that Revelation need not fear the discoveries of Science, not even such doctrines as that of Evolution. And the students of nature will certainly learn that Science has nothing to fear from the teaching of Revelation, not even from the claim to miraculous power. For most certainly both Science and Revelation come from one and the same God; 'the heavens declare His glory, and the firmament showeth His handywork; His law is perfect, converting the soul; His testimony is sure, making wise the simple.'



LECTURE VIII.

THE CONCLUSION OF THE ARGUMENT.

Uniformity of nature not demonstrated, but established, except in two cases; the interference of human will and of Divine Will. The exception no bar to the progress of Science. Unity to be found not in the physical world, but in the physical and moral combined. The Moral Law rests on itself. Our recognition of it on our own character and choice. But we expect it to show its marks in the physical world: and these are the purpose visible in Creation, the effects produced by Revelation. Nevertheless a demand for more physical evidence; but the physical cannot be allowed to overshadow the spiritual. Dangers to believers from leaning this way: superstition; blindness; stagnation. The guarantee for spiritual perceptiveness: to take Jesus as the Lord of the conscience, the heart, the will.



LECTURE VIII.

THE CONCLUSION OF THE ARGUMENT.

'No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost.' 1 Cor. xii. 3.

It is now the proper time to review the argument of these Lectures, and to endeavour to trace, if possible, the source of the estrangement which just at present separates Religion and Science.

The postulate of Science is admitted on all hands to be the uniformity of nature, and the proof of this postulate has been found to consist in an induction from the facts which nature presents and our senses observe. Uniformity is quickly noticed, and after it has been noticed for some time it is instinctively used as a working hypothesis. So used it accumulates perpetually increasing evidence of its truth, and if we except two great classes of facts, we never find any instance of its failure. The two classes of facts which are thus excepted are the acts of the human will and the miraculous element in Revelation, both of them instances of one thing, namely, the interference of the moral with the physical. To complete the induction and to deprive the denial of universal uniformity of all evidence to rest on, all that is necessary is to get rid of these two exceptions. If Science could get rid of these exceptions, though it could not be said that the fundamental postulate was demonstrated, it could be said that all the evidence was in its favour and absolutely no evidence against it. And although scientific belief would then still rank below mathematical belief, it would nevertheless have a cogency quite irresistible. Science would not thereby gain in power of progress, in practical acceptance, or in utility to man. But men are so constituted that completeness gives a special kind of satisfaction not to be got in any other way. If Science could but be complete it would seem to gain in dignity, if it gained in nothing else. And it is easy to foster a kind of passion for this completeness until every attempt to question it is resented. I have seen a boy first learning mechanics show a dislike to consider the effect of friction as marring the symmetry and beauty of mechanical problems; too vague, too uncertain, too irregular to be allowed any entrance into a system which is so rounded and so precise without it. And something of the same temper can sometimes be seen in students of Science at the very thought of there being anything in the world not under the dominion of the great scientific postulate. The world which thus contains something which Science cannot deal with is pronounced forthwith to be not the world that we know, not the world with which we are concerned; a conceivable world if we choose to indulge our imagination in such dreams, but not a real world either now or at any time before or after. And yet the freedom of the human will and the sense which cannot be eradicated of the responsibility attaching to all human conduct, perpetually retorts that this world in which we live contains an element which cannot be subdued to obedience to the scientific law, but will have a course of its own. The sense of responsibility is a rock which no demand for completeness in Science can crush. All attempts at reconciling the mechanical firmness of an unbroken law of uniformity with the voice within that cannot be silenced telling us that we must answer for our action, have failed, and we know that they will for ever fail.

If indeed it could be said that the progress of Science was really barred by this inability to make the induction complete, and to assert the unbroken uniformity of all nature; if it could be said that any uncertainty was thus cast over scientific conclusions, or any false or misleading lights thus held up to draw inquirers from the true path, it would undoubtedly become a duty to examine, and to examine anxiously, whether indeed it could be true that our faculties were thus hopelessly at variance with each other, the scientific faculty, imposing on us one belief, and the spiritual faculty another, and the two practically irreconcileable. But there is no reason whatever for thinking this. Newton's investigations were unquestionably pursued, as all true scientific investigations must ever be pursued, in reliance on the truth of the uniformity of nature, and yet he never felt it the slightest hindrance to his progress that he always tacitly and often expressly acknowledged that God had reserved to Himself the power of setting this uniformity aside, and indeed believed that He had used this power. The believer who asserts the universality of a law except when God works a miracle to set it aside is certainly at no real disadvantage in comparison with an unbeliever who makes the same assertion with no qualification at all. It is granted on all hands that miracles are, and ever have been, exceedingly rare, and for that reason need not be taken into account in the investigation of nature. It is granted that the freedom of the human will works within narrow limits, and very slowly and slightly affects the great mass of human conduct and what depends on human conduct. And Science has often to deal with approximations when nothing but approximations can be obtained. We perpetually meet in nature with quantities and relations that cannot be accurately expressed nor accurately ascertained, and we have to be content with approximations, and we know how to use them in Science. Many chemical properties can only be so expressed; many primary facts, such as the distances, the volumes, the weights of heavenly bodies; and yet the approximations serve our purpose. And so too, if there be a reserve still uncovered by the scientific postulate, that will not in any degree affect our investigation of what is so covered.

In short, the unity of all things which Science is for ever seeking will be found not in the physical world alone, but in the physical and spiritual united. That unity embraces both. And the uniformity which is the expression of that unity is not a uniformity complete in nature, taken by itself, but complete when the two worlds are taken together. And this Science ought to recognise.

Let us turn from the physical to the spiritual.

The voice within us which demands our acceptance of religion makes no direct appeal to the evidence supplied by the senses. We are called on to believe in a supreme law of duty on pain of being lowered before our own consciences. And this law of duty goes on to assert its own supremacy over all things that exist, and that not as an accidental fact, but as inherent in its essence. And this supremacy cannot be other than an accidental fact unless it be not only actual but intended. And intention implies personality; and the law thus shows itself to be a Supreme Being, claiming our reverence, and asserting Himself to be the Creator, the Ruler, and the Judge of all things that are. And this same voice within us asserts that we are responsible to Him for all our conduct, and are capable of that responsibility because free to choose what that conduct shall be. We are to believe not because the truth of this voice is proved independently of itself, but simply because we are commanded. Corroborative evidence may be looked for elsewhere, but the main, the primary evidence is within the soul.

Hence the strength of this belief depends on ourselves and on our own character. To every man the voice speaks. But its authority is felt in proportion to the spirituality of each who hears. Its acceptance is bound up in some way with our own wills. How far it is a matter of choice to believe or to disbelieve it is not possible to define. The will lies hidden as it were behind the emotions, the affections, the nobler impulses. The conscience shades off into the other faculties, and we cannot always isolate it from the rest. But though it be impossible to say precisely how the will is concerned in the spiritual belief, there can be no doubt that it always takes its part in such belief. It is the keen conscience, it is the will that can be moved to its depths by the conscience, that grasp most strongly the certainty of the law of duty. It is the man with the strongest and noblest aspirations, the man who sees the beauty of humility, the man who feels most strongly the deep peace of self-sacrifice, that is the man who finds the voice within most irresistible. It is not by any means always the man who lives the most correct life; correctness of life may be due to natural and not to spiritual causes. And the man whom we should find faultless in point of morals may yet be wanting in spiritual depth, and not have as yet, and perhaps may not have to the last, the spiritual faculty strong within him. But the man, even if he have many and grievous faults, who nevertheless is keenly susceptible of higher things, is the one to whom the voice within speaks with authority not to be gainsaid, and to him that voice is final.

It is this fact that the perception of things spiritual varies from man to man, and depends on character, and involves action of the will, that makes it always possible to represent our knowledge of the law of duty as in itself standing on a less sure foundation than our knowledge of scientific truth. Whether a man has or has not the necessary power of mind to comprehend scientific reasoning is tested with comparative ease. And if he have that power, the reasoning is certain in course of time to be understood, and when it is understood it compels assent so long as it keeps within its own proper domain. But the perception of spiritual truth depends on a faculty whose power or weakness it is far more difficult to test; and it involves the will which may be exerted on either side. And for this reason men sometimes dismiss this truth as being no more than an imagination, needed by some men to satisfy an emotional nature, but having no substance that can be brought to an external test. The believer in God knows that the truth which he holds is as certain as the axioms of mathematics; but he cannot make others know this whose spiritual faculty is not awake; and he is liable to be asked for proof not of the spiritual but of the physical kind.

Now this much must be acknowledged, that we cannot but expect the claim to supremacy over all things to show itself in some way in the creation which has come from Him who makes that claim. It would, no doubt, be a serious difficulty if things physical and things spiritual were cut off from one another by an absolute gulf; if we were required to believe that God had created and now ruled everything, and yet we could trace not the slightest evidence of His hand either in the creation or in the history of the world.

There are then two ways in which we are able to recognise Him even in this world of phenomena. For in the first place, the creation in its order and its beauty and its marvellous adaptation of means to ends, confirms the assertion of the spiritual faculty that it owes its origin to an intelligent and benevolent purpose, exhibited in the form in which purpose is always exhibited. It works towards ends which we should expect a holy and benevolent Creator to have in view, and it accomplishes those ends in so large a proportion that, making allowance for the limited range of our knowledge, the general aim of the whole is seen with sufficient clearness. The argument is not strong enough to compel assent from those who have no ears for the inward spiritual voice, but it is abundantly sufficient to answer those who argue that there cannot be a Creator because they cannot trace His action. And the scientific doctrine of Evolution, which at first seemed to take away the force of this argument, is found on examination to confirm it and expand it. The doctrine of Evolution shows that with whatever design the world was formed, that design was entertained at the very beginning and impressed on every particle of created matter, and that the appearances of failure are not only to be accounted for by the limitation of our knowledge, but also by the fact that we are contemplating the work before it has been completed.

And in the second place, while the creation, the more closely it is examined the more distinctly shows the marks of the wisdom and goodness of the Creator, so the history of the world exhibits in the Revelation made to man clear proofs of that heavenly love which corresponds to the character of Him who has put love at the head of all the requirements of His law. The Revelation given to us has undeniably made a real mark on the world. It has upheld millions of men in a holiness of life corresponding in a very real degree to the holiness required by the law of duty. It has perpetually more and more cleared up the true teaching of that law. It is still continuing the same process, and generation after generation is better able to understand that teaching. Its fruits have been a harvest of saints and martyrs, some known and reverenced, some quite unnoticed. It has leavened all literature and all legislation. It has changed the customs of mankind and is still changing them. And if it be replied that all this is nothing but one form of the development of humanity and shows no proof of a Divine Ruler, we have a right to ask what then could be the source of such a development, and how is it that so great a power should always have worked in the name of God and should have always referred everything to His command? That fanaticism should plead God's authority without any right to do so is intelligible. But is it intelligible that all this truth and justice and purity and self-sacrificing love, all this obedience to the Supreme Law, should be the fruit of believing a lie? If there be a God, it is to be expected that He would communicate with His creatures if those creatures were capable of receiving the communication; and if He did communicate with His creatures it is to be expected that His communication would be such as we find in the Bible. The purpose of the Bible, the form of it, the gradual formation of it, the steadily-growing Revelation contained in it, these harmonise with the moral law revealed originally in the conscience. And the effect which the Revelation has produced on human history is real and great. The power which God's Revelation has exerted on the world is an undeniable fact among phenomena. It is not a demonstration of His existence; but it is a full answer to those who say, 'If God made and rules the world why do we find no signs of His hand in its course?'

And thirdly, this Revelation has not merely taken the form of a message or a series of messages, but has culminated in the appearance of a person who has always satisfied and still satisfies the conception formed by our spiritual faculty of a human representation of the divine law. Our Lord's life is that law translated into human action, and all the more because human faculties had not first framed the conception which He then came to fulfil, but He exhibited the ideal, and our conception rose as it were to correspond to it. And, as He includes in Himself all the teaching, so does He give from Himself all the power of the Revelation which He came to crown. And every true disciple of Christ can bear witness to the reality of that power in sustaining the soul.

Thus has the God, whom our spiritual faculty commands us to worship and to reverence, shown Himself in the world of phenomena. And He has given proofs of His existence and His character precisely corresponding to the conception which He has enabled, and indeed commanded, us to form of Him. And it is because the proofs that He has given are of this nature that we are tempted to ask for more proofs of a different kind.

For it is undeniable that believers and unbelievers alike are perpetually asking for proofs that shall have more of the scientific and less of the religious character, proofs that shall more distinctly appeal to the senses. Believers in all ages have longed for external support to their faith; unbelievers have refused to believe unless supplied with more physical evidence. Believers shrink from being thrown inwards on themselves; they fear the wavering of their own faith; they are alarmed at the prospect of the buttresses of their belief being taken from them. They find it easier to believe the spiritual evidence, if they can first find much physical evidence. They wish (to use the Apostle's words) to walk by sight and not by faith. And unbelievers want a tangible proof that shall compel their understanding before it awakes their conscience. They demand a Revelation, not only confirmed by miracles at the time, but confirmed again and again by repeated miracles to every succeeding generation. They want miracles in every age adapted to the science of the age, miracles which no hardness of heart would be able to deny, which would convince the scientific man through his Science independently of his having any will to make holiness his aim when he had been convinced. This kind of evidence it has not pleased God to give. It is not the scientific man that God seeks as such, any more than it is the ignorant man that He seeks as such. And the proofs that He gives are plainly in all cases conditioned by the rule that the spiritually minded shall most easily and most keenly perceive their force.

And, as far as unbelievers are concerned, I do not see that more need be said except to tell them that this rule is inflexible, and that it is by another way that they must look to find God, and not by the way that they insist on choosing. But believers who are in the same case need to be warned of some very real dangers that always attend a faith which makes too much of things not spiritual.

For, first, there is a real and great danger that the spiritual may be altogether obscured by the literal and the physical. We look back with astonishment on the Rabbinical interpretations of the Old Testament, and all the more because of the really great and true thoughts that are sometimes to be found in the midst of their fanciful conceits. We can trace the mischief they did to true Religion by the perverted reverence with which they regarded the words and even the letters, and the very shapes of the letters, in which their sacred books were written. Their perversions of the law of God, their subtle refinements of interpretation, their trivial conceits, their false and misleading comments and inferences, all certainly tended to encourage the hypocrisy which our Lord rebuked, and against which St. Paul contended. But we still see something of the same spirit in the attempt to maintain a verbal and even literal inspiration of the whole Bible, filling it not with the breath of a Divine Spirit, but with minute details of doctrine and precept often questionable, and, whenever separated from the principles of the eternal law, valueless or even mischievous. God's Word, instead of leading us to Him, is made to stand between and hide His face.

But, secondly, there is a serious risk that if the mind be fastened on things external in some way connected with, but yet distinct from the substance of Revelation, it may turn out that these external things cannot hold the ground on which they have been placed. They have to be given up by force at last, when they ought to have been given up long before. And when given up they too often tear away with them part of the strength of that faith of which they had previously been not only the buttress outside but a part of the living framework. It is distinctly the fault of religious, not of scientific men, that there was once a great contest between the Bible and Astronomy, that there has since been a great contest between the Bible and Geology, that there is still a great contest between the Bible and Evolution. In no one of these cases was the Revelation contained in the Bible in danger, but only the interpretation commonly put on the Bible. It is easy long afterwards to condemn the opponents of Galileo and speak of their treatment of him and his teaching as fanaticism and bigotry; and such condemnation has not unfrequently been heard from the very lips that nevertheless denounced the teaching of the geologists. But in all these cases the principle has been the same, and believers have insisted that the Bible itself was gone unless their interpretation of it was upheld. And the mischief is double. For many believers, and more especially unlearned believers, instead of gently helping one another to form the necessary modification of their view of the Bible teaching, instead of endeavouring to find the way out of the perplexity and to disentangle the true spiritual lesson from the accessories which are no part of itself, insisted that it must be all or nothing, and prepared for themselves a very severe trial. There was no doctrine involved whatever; there was nothing at stake on which the spiritual life depended. The duty to be patient, to enquire carefully, to study the other side, to wait for light, was as plain as any duty could be. But all this was forgotten in a somewhat unreasoning impulse to resist an assault on the faith. And there cannot be a doubt that on all these occasions many believers have been seriously shaken by slowly finding out that the position they have taken is untenable. When men have to give up in such circumstances they generally give up far more than they need, and in some cases an unreasonable resistance has been followed by an equally unreasonable surrender. And while believers have thus prepared a stumblingblock for themselves they have put quite as great a stumblingblock before others. For students of Science, informed by instant voices all around that they must choose between their Science and the Bible, knowing as they did that their Science was true, and supposing that the lovers and defenders of the Bible best knew what its teaching was, had no choice as honest men but to hold the truth as far as they possessed it and to give up the Bible in order to maintain their Science. It was a grievous injury inflicted on them; and though some among them might deserve no sympathy, there were some whom it was a great loss to lose.

But in the third place, the result of this clinging to externals is to shut out Science and all its correlative branches of knowledge from their proper office of making perpetually clearer the true and full meaning of the Revelation itself. It is intended that Religion should use the aid of Science in clearing her own conceptions. It is intended that as men advance in knowledge of God's works and in power of handling that knowledge, they should find themselves better able to interpret the message which they have received from their Father in Heaven. Our knowledge of the true meaning of the Bible has gained, and it was intended that it should gain, by the increase of other knowledge. Science makes clearer than anything else could have made it the higher level on which the Bible puts what is spiritual over what is material. I do not hesitate to ascribe to Science a clearer knowledge of the true interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis, and to scientific history a truer knowledge of the great historical prophets. The advance of secular studies, as they are called, clears up much in the Psalms, and much in the other poetical Books of Scripture. I cannot doubt that this was intended from the beginning, and that as Science has already done genuine service to Religion in this way, so will it do still better service with process of time.

On this side also, as on the scientific side, the teaching of the spiritual faculty and the teaching of Revelation indicate that the physical and the spiritual worlds are one whole, and that neither is complete without the other. Science enters into Religion, and is its counterpart, and has its share to take in the conduct of life and in the formation of opinion. And the believer is bound to recognise its value and make use of its services.

In conclusion, it is plain that the antagonism between Science and Religion arises much more from a difference of spirit and temper in the students of each than from any inherent opposition between the two. The man of Science is inclined to shut out from consideration a whole body of evidence, the moral and spiritual; the believer is inclined to shut out the physical. And each, from long looking at that evidence alone which properly belongs to his own subject, is inclined to hold the other cheap, and to charge on those who adduce it either blindness of understanding or wilful refusal to accept the truth. And when such a conflict arises it is the higher and not the lower, it is Faith and not Science that is likely to suffer. For the physical evidence is tangible, and the perception of it not much affected by the character of the man who studies it; the spiritual evidence stands unshaken in itself, but it is hid from eyes that have no spiritual perception, and that perception necessarily varies with the man.

By what means then can a man keep his spiritual perception in full activity? And is there any test by which a man may know whether his spiritual faculty is in contact with the source of all spiritual life and is deriving from that source the full flow of spiritual power? Revelation, if it tells us anything, ought to tell us this. And the answer which Revelation makes is expressed in the words of St. Paul, 'No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost.' This doctrine runs through the New Testament, and it implies that one main purpose of our Lord's appearance among men was to give them in His life, His character, His example, His teaching, at once a touchstone by which they could always try their own spirits, and judge of the real condition of their own spiritual faculty, and also a vivid presentation of the supreme spiritual law by which they could for ever more and more elevate and purify and strengthen their own spiritual power and knowledge.

Let a man study the Jesus of the Gospels. Let him put before his conscience the teaching that Jesus gives; the picture drawn of our Father in Heaven whose holiness cannot allow a stain upon a single soul, and whose tenderness cannot endure that a single soul should perish; Who ruleth all the universe, and yet without whom not a sparrow falleth to the ground; the picture drawn of the ideal human life, the humility, the hunger and thirst after righteousness, the utter self-sacrifice, the purity; the picture drawn of human need, the helplessness, the hopelessness of man without God. Let him ponder on all this and on the many touching expressions, the truth, the depth, the force, the superhuman sweetness and gentleness with which all is presented. And if his conscience bows before it, and can say without reserve and in unalloyed sincerity, 'This is my Lord; He shall be my teacher; here I recognise the fulness of the eternal law; at His feet will I henceforth sit and learn; through Him will I drink of the well-springs of eternal truth; His voice will I trust to the very utmost;' then may that man be sure that his conscience is in contact with the Father of spirits, and that his study will guide him into fuller and clearer knowledge, and more certain conviction that he is grasping the truth of God.

Let a man put before his heart our Lord's own character. Let him think of the life of privation without complaint, of service to His kind without a thought of self; of His unfailing sympathy with the unhappy, of His tenderness to the penitent; of His royal simplicity and humility; of His unwearied perseverance in the face of angry opposition; of His deep affection for the friends of His choice even when they deserted Him in His hour of darkness; of His death on the Cross and the unearthly love that breathed in every word He uttered and everything He did. Let him read all this many times; and if his heart goes out to the Man whom he is thus beholding, if he can say with all his soul, This is my Lord; here is the supreme object of my affection; Him will I love with all my strength; from Him I will never, if I can help it, let my heart swerve; no other do I know more worthy to be loved; no other will I keep more steadily before my eyes; no other will I more earnestly desire to imitate; no other shall be my example, my trust, my strength, my Saviour; if a man can say this, it is certain that his heart is touched by God, and the heavenly fire is kindled in his soul.

Let a man put before his will the Lord's commands; the aims, the self-restraints, the aspirations that the Lord required in His disciples. Let him ponder on the call to heavenly courage in spite of all that earth can inflict or can take away; the call to take up the Cross and follow Him that was crucified; the warnings and the promises, the precepts and the prohibitions; let him think of the Leader who never flinched, of the Lawgiver who outdid His own law; let him think on the nobleness of the aims to which He pointed; of the promise of inward peace made to those who sacrificed themselves, made by our Lord and re-echoed from the very depths of our spiritual being; let him think of the sure help promised in return for absolute trust, tried by millions of saints and never yet known to fail. Let a man put this before his will, and if he can say with all his soul, This is my Lord; here I recognise Him who has a right to my absolute obedience; here is the Master that I mean to serve and follow; and in spite of my own weakness and blindness, in spite of my sins, in spite of stumbling and weariness of resolution, in spite of temptations and in spite of falls, I will not let my eyes swerve, nor my purpose quit my will; through death itself I will obey my Lord and trust to Him to carry me through whatever comes; that man most certainly is moving in the strength of God, and the power of the Eternal Spirit lives within him.

Our Lord is the crown, nay, the very substance of all Revelation. If He cannot convince the soul, no other can. The believer stakes all faith on His truth; all hope on His power. If the man of Science would learn what it is that makes believers so sure of what they hold, he must study with an open heart the Jesus of the Gospels; if the believer seeks to keep his faith steady in the presence of so many and sometimes so violent storms of disputation, he will read of, ponder on, pray to, the Lord Jesus Christ.



FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: The Data of Philosophy.]

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